CEO & CTO are causing the downfall of this place
Pros
The company was genuinely fun to work at. The engineering team was so skilled and the office was always a good vibe. There was free snacks all day long and free lunches on Thursdays. The socials every month were the best thing ever and I've made life long friends because of this company. The People Ops Coordinator in London was amazing and she always made sure the socials were the best they could be! She really was the backbone of the London office for any issues you could have. The product was nice to work on with some great clients to be able to put under your name. Managers were quite good too and had weekly check-ins which ensured you always knew where you stood. Unfortunately all of that is tainted by the following...
Cons
The CEO & CTO (co-founders). In my entire time at Conduktor, I don't think I once spoke to someone who liked the CEO or enjoyed working with him. It is true that CEOs aren't there to be liked, they are there to lead companies well. He, unfortunately, does neither. He would change his mind on the direction of the company every other quarter. First it was ****, then it was ****, then it was whatever else he came up with. All in the span of under a year. His company-wide messages on Slack were always corporate BS without actually addressing the concerns that staff had. The CTO had no idea, for some reason, that he was NO LONGER an engineer. He would still contribute AI slop PRs and the engineers that worked on his team would be responsible for reviewing it. That creates such a weird position for them because would you be really honest if his PR was trash? Probably not. He never actually coded anything by hand and instead just vibe coded all of his PRs which, of course, introduced bugs into the code that engineers needed to then clean up. No one wanted to be on a team with him because of all of this but some had unfortunately drawn the short straw and you could feel that it was getting to them having to work with him. I'm really sad to have to write this review as I think the company, staff and product itself were really really cool and was a great place to work at both professionally & socially. Unfortunately, these latest layoffs where they got rid of basically their entire engineering department means the company will continue going downhill if the CEO & CTO think they have nothing to change about themselves. The CTO will keep alienating all of the remaining engineers until they all leave. One AI slop PR at a time. It's saddening to not be able to recommend this company anymore to people who might have an offer from them as they did these sort of layoffs once. SWORE they would never do it again and lo and behold, here we are with a massive layoff yet again. I can bet they will at some point mass hire again and the cycle repeats.
